German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "mein" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce mein in German?

mein is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /maɪ̯n/. It means “my.” MINE — the English word, exactly. ei says 'eye' and the n closes it.

MINE — the English word, exactly. ei says 'eye' and the n closes it.

mein /maɪ̯n/

Possessives ride quietly through a sentence, giving their weight to the noun they attach to. Stress arrives only in a tug-of-war over ownership — MEIN Bruder, not yours — and the diphthong lengthens noticeably when it does. Adding endings, as in meine and meinem, never shifts the beat off the first syllable.

Listen: mein

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

m A straightforward m with the lips fully closed.

ei The 'eye' glide: it starts open and rises toward 'ee' without ever settling there.

n A clear n, slightly longer than English because nothing follows to blur it.

Hear it in a sentence

Das ist mein Bruder.

That's my brother.

Listen: Das ist mein Bruder.

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Das ist mein Bruder shows the bare, endingless form, which is what masculine nominative gets. That bareness is the point: mein, dein, sein and kein all leave the masculine nominative and neuter forms unmarked and only sprout endings elsewhere. Bruder ends in the softened -er and carries a long u.

Where English speakers slip

Since the German and English words sound identical, the sound rarely goes wrong — 'meen' happens, but less often than with nein or eins. The real trouble is grammatical overreach: learners add an ending here by analogy with eine, producing meine Bruder. The endingless form is correct for a masculine noun in the nominative, and the pronunciation stays a plain, clean 'mine'.